Silverlight: Microsoft’s multi-language Flash alternative
Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch has one of the best writeups I’ve seen about Microsoft’s Silverlight (formerly WPF/E): Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer. Silverlight is gunning for Flash/Flex. Flash and Flex have some huge advantages: they’re fast, tiny and installed. The “installed” part is actually not that important, as far as end-user installation goes. Installing a plugin, especially on IE on Windows, is pretty easy. “Installed” is important, though, because there are many developers who are used to the Flash/Flex systems.
Flex is being open sourced, which will only help its adoption. Flash also runs on Linux, which Silverlight does not. Seriously, though, that may not matter yet. Linux desktop penetration is still quite small.
The big, new announcement about Silverlight is that it’s got a “mini-CLR”. A 4MB download gives Windows and Mac users the ability to run programs written in C#, Python, JavaScript and Ruby in their browsers. Granted 4MB is quite a bit larger than Flash, but if people start producing Silverlight apps/video sites, will that 4MB deter users? Unlikely, I’d say.
I’m still a fan of Flex, and I’m definitely a fan of the increasingly open approach that Adobe is taking. The competition here looks like it’s going to be pretty fierce, and that can only be a good thing for the users.
Update: I forgot to mention an important other point (sorry… this post is kind of rushed…) Something that I think is seriously in favor of Flash/Flex is that the development tools are cross platform. Macs have been big in design shops for a long time, and still are. And, many of the Mac OS X “switchers” over the past few years have been software developers (go to an open source development conference like PyCon and you’ll see what I mean). The fact that I can develop Flex applications on my Mac is a big deal. And I don’t have to settle for text editors and command line compilers. The Flex Builder IDE and the full Flash environment are both available for the Mac. This is not the case with Microsoft’s tools for Silverlight.
The Mac OS X runtime seems to be 10 MB, not just 4 MB as the Windows version
Yeah, it’s a universal binary… so it’s going to have twice the code.
It would be sweet to have a LAMP web framework embrace modern web display technologies like Flash and Silverlight.
Hi Sam,
I saw your similar comment over on my recent Adobe Flex posting. What kind of “embrace” are you thinking of? Basically, using one of these rich internet application tools, you just start setting up the server side as a “web services” delivery mechanism rather than a “web page” delivery mechanism. You can do this today pretty easily with nearly any web framework… (In fact, there’s a screencast of Adobe’s James Ward and Bruce Eckel putting together a Flex app with a TurboGears backend using TG’s built in JSON support…)
ActiveX for Web 2.0! Wonderful.
Ever since your demo of TurboGears at the Atlanta Python Meetup, I’ve found creating web content outside a browser unsatisfactory. Web content should be created in a web environment. Right now, TG has textual goodness built in with HTML/JS/CSS. If you added Flash support, you would have audio/visual goodness, with greatly expanded capabilities. In fact, you’d have a web framework that stood out from the pack. You can easily splice Flash onto TG, like in the demo, but it would be cool to build it in.
Splice onto TurboGears
1. Adobe’s MXMLC compiler (for content creation, not for using live)
2. Precompiled SWF’s for the client to import dynamically
3. ActionScript class libraries
4. ActionScript templates to run through TG and into the MXMLC compiler
5. Tie it all together with server side web services, as you noted…
Now, you have Flash with the higher level order of Python and TurboGears.
PS In the above, I use Flash and TG to mean…
Flash == Flash/Silverlight or any other graphically advanced web display technology.
TurboGears == TG or any similar LAMP web framework.
Ahh, I see what you mean now. Yes, such a beast would be cool. And, with Adobe’s open source announcement, MXMLC could even be packaged up with that particular beast.
It’s definitely a workable technique, and probably dangerous in the hands of experienced coders.
I assume that Silverlight has similar capabilities to Flash, but am ignorant of the .NET platform.